“Indie Interfaces” is an intimate industry-academic symposium designed to facilitate knowledge exchange between academics and influential actors working in the field of indie games. Held in Montréal, a city renowned for its diverse and vibrant game development communities, this pathbreaking event will combine roundtable discussions among industry attendees and academic research presentations to foster productive, critical dialogue and collaboration. Moving beyond definitional debates about what counts as indie, this symposium is intended to stimulate innovative, interdisciplinary academic work that can feed forward into game industry practices.

We are seeking submissions from academics doing research on indie games (defined broadly), with a specific focus on the actors, objects, and processes that scaffold independent game production, distribution, and consumption. All proposals are welcome, including those that engage the following topics and approaches:

* Cultural intermediation and brokerage in and around indie games; * Maintaining, curating, and mediating games scenes and communities; * Indie career paths, precarity, venture labour, and gig economies; * Indie games and cultural/economic policy; * Geographies of indie game development (local, regional, transnational); * Economic and cultural sustainability in indie game development; * Collaborative workspaces and creative communities; * Ethnographic Studio/Production Studies of both development and community organizations; * “Above” and “below the line” labour in indie game development; * Indie game festivals, conventions, showcases, and exhibitions; * Analyses of indie game distribution, consumption, and reception; * Labour advocacy and organization in and around the games industry; * Entrepreneurship and innovation in indie games; * Political and cultural economies of indie games; * Analyses of gendered labour in and around indie games; * Affective, emotional, and relational labour;

Comparisons to film, music, and other forms of independent cultural production.

Please submit 300 word abstracts, along with a brief author biography, to indie.interfaces@gmail.com<mailto:indie.interfaces@gmail.com> by June 5, 2017. Notifications will be sent out by the end of June. Full draft papers will be due August 1, 2017 and will be circulated to attendees in advance to encourage focused, productive conversations during the symposium.